If you are still marinating in the misery of not being able to attend Hogwarts, then get thee to the baking aisle of your nearest grocery store. Then you, my friend, might have a chance of one day recreating the magic of this Hogwarts made of gingerbread like this one skillful baker did. Imgur user and baker louisesiuol posted the images of her delicious creation, and it is one your Christmas dreams are made of. I can't even imagine the kind of care and (gulps) math it took to perfectly architect this edible model of our favorite place on earth, but one look at it is enough to know that all the time she put into it was hella worth it.
I used to work in a bakery as an office assistant, and every year the decorators would bake gingerbread house kits for parties — and let me tell you right now, that game is a lot harder to play than it looks. You have to get the dough just right and do all these fancy things to it — mix the ingredients in a particular way, refrigerate it just enough but not too long, spin around three times and sacrifice your first born — and maybe it will bake in the exact shape you intended it. Maybe. And that's with just your simple, run-of-the-mill gingerbread house. This, my friends, is anything but.
Aside from the difficulty of baking and assembling all of this gloriously dorky castle, she then went to the trouble of individually frosting every inch of this to look exactly like Hogwarts. There's a giant CLOCK embedded in the gingerbread, and more trees and baubles than your post-Christmas heart can handle. My New Year's Resolution is to find whatever mushroom will shrink me to the size of this castle and live inside of it for the rest of my days, slowly eating my way through the walls of the Great Hall.
The only drawback of this, of course, is that this is altogether too beautiful to eat — thereby breaking my (and Ron Weasley's) heart. But sweet tooth though I may be, even I am willing to acknowledge that this gingerbread is serving too high of a purpose to be consumed. Maybe she can turn the scraps into a Shrieking Shack to feast on once she finishes all the work on this masterpiece?
In any case, let us all bask in the glory of this tasty nerd treat. We know not who you are, Imgur user louisesiuol, but you are giving Potterheads with appetites everywhere a good name. Fifty points to Hufflepuff!
Images: Imgur, Giphy, Warner Bros
